Marley Lyon is a large-scale metal and sound artist whose practice asserts the necessity of occupying physical and sonic space as a radical act of resistance and reclamation. Operating between New York, Detroit, and Chicago, Lyon engages welding and fabrication as primary tools, constructing monumental metal forms that dialogue with immersive sound environments. These works do more than occupy space—they transform it, inviting audiences into experiential zones where structural critique and sensory engagement converge.

Lyon’s artistic inquiry begins with a fundamental desire: to become unstuck from inherited beliefs and dominant narratives. This pursuit informs a process steeped in continuous unlearning and recontextualization, wherein materials and sound operate as agents of rupture and possibility. The artist’s commitment to research grounds the practice in historical depth and conceptual rigor; sonic archives, experimental audio techniques, and historical data serve as source material, shaping layered compositions that reverberate within and beyond the sculptural frame. Through this synthesis, Lyon constructs environments that function as both aesthetic and discursive spaces, compelling viewers to reckon with the entanglements of race, gender, class, and systemic harm.

Scale, for Lyon, is neither incidental nor merely formal—it is a political imperative. In a world that often seeks to diminish marginalized voices, the monumentality of their work asserts presence with uncompromising clarity. The sculptures’ industrial heft, coupled with the intangible yet pervasive quality of sound, engenders a dual experience: one of weight and vibration, of structure and resonance. This interplay fosters conditions for deep reflection and collective encounter, positioning the viewer not as a passive observer but as an implicated participant in a dynamic field of tension and possibility.

At the core of Lyon’s installations lies an ethic of confrontation and care. These spaces are not neutral; they are charged sites designed to surface difficult conversations and unsettle ingrained assumptions. Yet they also hold space for repair, offering what the artist describes as an “opening”—a locus for dialogue, listening, and the fragile labor of understanding. By compelling audiences to slow down and inhabit the temporalities of metal and sound, Lyon reorients perception, enabling moments of vulnerability that can seed transformation.

In its totality, Lyon’s practice constitutes a profound interrogation of the systems structuring contemporary life and the traumas they reproduce. Through the material density of metal and the affective force of sound, their work stages encounters where critique and imagination coalesce—an invitation to inhabit, however briefly, the threshold between rupture and renewal.